A list that offers quality and inspiring songs for meditation
Below zero temperatures, snow, ice, breath-taking cold and the need to take refuge in warm places, alone or with good company. It’s winter and the thermometer is unforgiving, but there is always music that offers warmth. The following list of five albums (it could have been another twenty more) is just a personal selection to cover us with the songs like a magical cloak. Albums that inspire meditation, human warmth, authentic homely pleasure from the city, the mountains or wherever one is.
By clicking on the album title, you go directly to the album in question on Spotify.
This debut was like a fable: a guy who, after being disappointed with a great love, locked himself in a cabin in a forest in Wisconsin and composed an album to celebrate being alive and in the middle of a great winter. His falsetto voice accompanied by an intimate and slow-cooked recreation with acoustic guitars could not be more bucolic. The guy’s name was Justin Vernon, but he artistically called himself Bon Iver (good winter).
Neko Case is one of those voices that always holds more than it seems. Disturbing and seductive in its fabulous timbre, its rock mixes with folk to aspire to beautiful territory. In this album he signed a true gem, which invites you to sink into the icy nights.
Another impressive debut was from this group from Seattle. The appearance of Fleet Foxes was a small big event in 2006 in North American music. Country folk dressed in a modern coat and full of echoes of a past that could bring together the more rural Byrds with Fairport Convention without losing an iota of their own personality. Pure snowy mountain.
The sixth album by the American singer and songwriter confirmed that her folk was based in an ethereal atmosphere. It was backed by very good previous works and within the always recommended Nonesuch label. This album offers wonderful warmth.
The enormous and never sufficiently vindicated Stephen Stills (Buffalo Springsfield and Crosby, Stills and Nash) released this solo album and achieved a wonderful mix of folk, acoustic blues, hard rock and gospel, typical of a talent from the 60s seeking to maintain his star in the 70s. The cover speaks for itself: there is folk of great authorship. Only because of ‘Go Back Home’ and ‘We Are Not Helpness’ does it have its own dimension (and what guitars).
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About the signature
Cultural editor specialized in music. He belongs to El País Semanal and is the author of La Ruta Norteamericana. Music critic at Cadena Ser. He has worked for Efe, Abc, Ruta 66, Efe Eme and Rolling Stone. He has written the books ‘Broken Chords’, ‘Martha’, ‘Ways of Living’, ‘Everything that matters happens in songs’ and ‘Something that serves as light’. He is from Madrid.
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